This
unusual quire contains a miscellany of non-liturgical matter. Its appearance
suggests it was completed in stages, not necessarily over a long period
of time, not designed in detail from the outset. Three notable features
are that it is all written by Scribe 3, all the illustrations are by
the Alexis Master and, unlike the rest of the book, there are no stitch
marks for curtains over the pictures.

It
consists of the Chanson of St Alexis, the earliest surviving piece of
French literature, and among the earliest written examples of the French
language. Its first three pages are arrestingly written in red and blue
ink, but it then reverts to black ink. It is followed by the letter
of Pope Gregory the Great, arranged in somewhat cramped fashion on p68.
The initials for Alexis and the letter are in different styles, suggesting
they were made at different times. There follow three miniatures illustrating
the Road to Emmaus. On the
first of these, the scribe begins his wrap-around commentary in a complicated
sequence of coloured inks. The last folio of the quire is crammed with
a discourse on good and evil (p71-72)
and David introducing the psalms. The final
Emmaus scene (p71) is deliberately placed against the gutter of
the page to allow this discourse to wrap around it. This at least shows
that the Emmaus scenes, the discourse and the new start of the psalms
(p72) were planned at the
same time.

The
presence of the Alexis Master throughout this quire indicates that it
cannot have been made much later than the rest of the book. However,
his use of washes instead of full colour for the miniatures perhaps
indicates a hierarchy of spiritual values. This technique is being applied
to a quire whose contents are particularly personal and relevant to
both Christina and Geoffrey.

THE
OLD FRENCH LIFE OF SAINT ALEXIS
by Margaret Jubb

The
St Albans Psalter copy (c. 1123) of the Vie de saint Alexis (hereafter
VSA) is one of the oldest surviving texts written in
Old French. We have two texts (the Strasbourg Oaths and Sequence of Saint
Eulalia) from the ninth century, and three (the Jonah fragment, Clermont
Passion and Life of Saint Leger) from the tenth century, but they are
little more than linguistic curiosities for the examination of philologists.
By contrast, the VSA is a work of significant literary
merit, and it marks the real beginning of French literature in the Middle
Ages. It predates the oldest surviving copy (c. 1150) of the Chanson
de Roland, which is interestingly also preserved in an Anglo-Norman
manuscript.

It is not surprising
then that the VSA should have attracted much scholarly attention.
However, the circumstances of its production and the manuscript context
in which it occurs have been largely ignored by philologists and literary
scholars alike. Editors typically call it either the Hildesheim text,
Hildesheim being where it is presently located, or use the siglum
L, for Lamspringe, the Benedictine abbey to which the manuscript
was taken from England in 1643. Legge (1956: 228) was the first literary
specialist to highlight the pioneering work of Goldschmidt (1895) on the
St Albans Psalter. More recently, Kendrick (1989) and Camille (1995) have
integrated the observations of art historians with those of literary specialists
and have looked at the text as a visual as well as a verbal artefact.
We are fortunate now to have unprecedented access to high-quality colour
images of the Psalter and to see the text as it would have been seen in
the twelfth century, not as we are accustomed to see it laid out in modern
printed editions, or even as we might see it in black and white facsimile
reproductions.

The
Layout of the Text

In printed editions,
the text of the VSA is laid out as verse, in five-line stanzas.
By contrast, in the manuscript, it is written in continuous lines, as
if it were prose, but with a capital initial letter as the prominent visual
marker of the beginning of each new stanza. The capitals are all the more
prominent, because they are not used elsewhere, as a modern writer would
use them, for proper names, such as Alexis and Rome. The end of each stanza
is marked with a mid-line point, and line ends are also indicated, albeit
somewhat sporadically, by a point. Thus, in the first stanza, three of
the five line-ends are marked, but in the second stanza only the final
line ends with a point. In addition to these visual clues, or cues, which
would have helped to orientate the reader/performer, there are aural indications
of the verse form which would have been unmistakeable to the listener.
Each line has ten syllables with a caesura (pause) after the fourth syllable,
this regular rhythm being sometimes slightly varied with the addition
of an unstressed ‘e’ after the stressed fourth and tenth syllables.
In performance, there would have been a regular rise and fall of the voice,
up to the caesura and down to the line end. The lines of each stanza are
assonanced, that is to say the final vowel is identical, but the consonants
which follow, for example amur (l. 2), prut (l. 3) are
not necessarily the same, as they would be in a true rhyme. A new stanza
is often signalled by a change in the assonance.

Printed editions
may benefit a modern “silent” reader by clarifying the versification
visually, but they erase the effects of its coloured calligraphy. Leupin
(1989: 44) describes this in a telling phrase as the ‘staging of
the writing’. However, what he describes (42) as the ‘alternating
red and black lines of the prologue’ (p. 57) are in fact red and
blue. Moreover, though he does not observe it, the same alternating pattern
continues on the first two pages (pp. 58 and 59) of the poem itself. Whereas
the initials of pp.60-68 are alternately red and blue, in contrast to
the black which is used for the surrounding text, the pattern on pp. 58
and 59 is more complicated. After the capital B on p. 58, there is first
a blue initial and then a red one, but thereafter all the initials are
green, making them more easily distinguishable against the red and blue
lines of text. There was clearly a functional need for the initials to
stand out and signal the beginning of each stanza, but the intricate use
of three colours of ink exceeds this immediate need. Moreover, no functional
explanation can be found for the alternating red and blue lines of text
in the prologue on p. 57, or on pp. 58-9 of the poem where they bear no
relationship to line or stanza division. Like the alternating pattern
of red, blue and green lines which we see in the captions to the miniatures
on p. 57 (and on pp. 69, 71 and 72 which follow the VSA), the
various patterns of coloured calligraphy may well have been intended as
a sort of visual game, part of the aesthetic pleasure to be derived from
the work. The ‘plausible moralizing thrust’ which Leupin (1989:
42) detected in the coloured lines of the prologue to the VSA
is all the more implausible when we realise that red (the colour of Christ)
alternates not with black (the colour of Satan), but with blue.

The
Prologue

The prologue is unique
to the St Albans Psalter copy of the VSA and is essential to
its particular presentation of the text. Yet it was relegated to an appendix
by G. Paris in his 1872 critical edition and is absent entirely from the
most recent scholarly edition of Perugi (2000). Even when an editor such
as Storey (1968) includes it and places it at the beginning of the text,
much of its effect is lost when separated from the images which precede
it in the manuscript. We should note first of all that the full-page illustration
on the left-hand page (p. 56) facing the prologue, shows King David as
musician. In this context, it is significant that the prologue describes
the Alexis text as a song (‘cancun’), not as a poem. We shall
be returning to the question of the ‘performance’ of the text
in due course.

The
illustrations which precede the prologue on p. 57 are discussed in detail
in the commentary on the Alexis quire. Suffice it to say here that
the prologue also focusses on the early part of the Alexis story, rather
than on his subsequent self-mortification. His upbringing and devout youth
are briefly mentioned, as too is his special place in God’s affections,
but nothing is said of the circumstances leading up to his marriage. Indeed
the prologue does not even explicitly state that he goes away and leaves
his bride behind; it merely states that he commends her to the true living
Bridegroom, who is described in terms possibly reminiscent of the Nicene
Creed as being ‘one sole creator who reigns in the Trinity’.
Instead of circumstantial detail, the writer turns to the more general
spiritual application of the story, which he recommends as a supreme consolation
for all those who live chastely and take delight in virginal marriage.
This would naturally include Christina and Geoffrey and all those in holy
orders.

Tempting though it
may be to suggest that the prologue could have been composed by Geoffrey
himself as a coded dedication to Christina, and a reflection on the chaste
relationship between the two of them, the language in which it is written
presents an obvious difficulty. There are awkwardnesses of expression
which a native of France like Geoffrey would surely not have produced.
For example, the construction ‘il desirrables icel sul filz angendrat’
is judged by Tyssens (1966: 1174) too unusual to have been written by
a native speaker. In any case, as Bullington (1991: 220) points out, the
adjective ‘desirrables’ is inappropriate to describe
Eufemien who is desirOUS of a son. The poem (l. 456) more appropriately
uses ‘desirruse’ to describe the same attitude in
the mother. Tyssens (1966: 1170) calculates that nearly half of the words
used in the prologue do not appear at all in the poem. Even more significantly,
she notes that ‘grace’ (l. 362) and ‘memoire’
(l. 621) have a different meaning when they appear in the poem. The linguistic
evidence suggests that the prologue can be neither the work of Geoffrey
himself nor the work of the original poet, though of course both the prologue
and the poem have been copied by the same hand with, as we have seen,
the same pattern of alternating red and blue lines on pp. 57, 58 and 59.

Before we can discuss
who might have composed the prologue, at what date and for what purpose,
we should consider certain ambiguities in its content and form. Its most
conspicuous idiosyncrasy is that it does not name Alexis. Admittedly his
name does appear in the first Latin caption above the illustrations, but
it is still a strange omission from the French prologue. The writer purports
to be introducing the story of the father Eufemien and only by extension
the life of his blessed son. The reference to previously heard song and
readings about this son is puzzling. It could be taken simply as a reference
to other songs and readings about Saint Alexis. Alternatively, it may
be a reference to the VSA itself, which the audience may have
heard performed in a previous year on the saint’s feastday (see
l. 542: ‘For that reason is he honoured on this day’) and
is about to hear again. The direct address of presenter to audience is
apparent in the use of the first-person plural form ‘we have heard
readings and song’, but the prologue cannot simply be described
as the presenter’s sales-pitch to his public, for though it may
on occasion have been delivered orally, it is here inscribed textually
and is therefore addressed to a reader or readers rather than to a group
of listeners. The problematic relationship between orality and writing
is a central question to which we will return in discussion of the poem
itself, but we should remember that in its manuscript context the prologue
is addressed not only to a reader, but also to a viewer, and it serves
as much as a commentary on the images above it as on the text which follows.
As such, the prologue might be directing Christina to identify herself
with the bride of Christ, rather than with the imitator of Christ, Alexis
himself, though as Camille (1995:388) has observed, it would be possible
for Christina to adopt ‘multiple subject-positions’.

The form of the prologue,
no less than its content, has given rise to much debate. It is usually
described as being in prose, and Woledge and Clive (1964) include it without
question in their repertory of early French prose texts. Yet in his edition
of the text, Hofmann (1868) highlighted the presence of twenty words ending
in an assonance. Tyssens (1966: 1166) noted further that the copyist’s
eleven punctuation points all occur immediately after one of these assonanced
words. In the poem itself, as we have seen above, punctuation points are
used to indicate assonanced line ends, and there seems little doubt that
they served a similar function in the prologue. The implication is that
the copyist must have been aware of the regular appearance of certain
endings. It should be noted, however, that the contrasting coloured initials
which indicate the beginning of each new stanza in the poem are conspicuous
by their absence from the prologue. Yet a vestigial line structure is
apparent aurally not just in the assonances, but also in a recognisable
decasyllabic pattern, albeit sometimes formed of elements (4 or 6 syllables)
of complete lines. The prologue would seem then to show some similarities
with the verse form of the VSA. Yet, as Hofmann (1868) indicated,
the assonance pattern in the prologue indicates a grouping of lines into
laisses (stanzas of unequal length), rather than regular five-line
stanzas.

In view of all the
linguistic and formal differences between prologue and poem, it seems
highly unlikely that the prologue was composed by the original poet of
the VSA who supposedly wrote, as we will discuss below, in Normandy
around 1040. The opening words, ‘Here begins ..’, raise an
interesting possibility. Though this is a formula found in many rubrics,
yet the calligraphic presentation of the prologue with alternating red
and blue lines to match the opening of the poem suggests that the copyist
saw it as part of the text, not as a separate rubric. The formula is also
found in many chansons de geste destined for oral delivery. Tyssens
(1966: 1174) suggests, therefore, that whoever was responsible for these
lines intended them for oral delivery as part of the performance of the
poem. It was by no means unusual for twelfth-century remanieurs
to add a prologue of this sort to an older poem. The composer of the Alexis
prologue may well have had an aural memory of such prologues, which would
have been in epic laisses, when he composed his own. The evident
purpose of the prologue would have been to gain the attention of an audience,
to whet their appetite with a rapid sketch of the narrative, and to promote
the poem, both for its aesthetic attractions (‘pleasing song’)
and its uplifting spiritual content. Yet, as we have observed above, the
prologue in its written form also addresses the reader/viewer. Whether
the St Albans copyist had before him a twelfth-century proto-prologue
which he adapted to his intended readership by adding a final recommendation
to ‘all those who … take delight in heavenly joys and virginal
marriage’, we can but guess. This is the not altogether convincing
suggestion of Bullington (1991: 223), but it could equally be the case
that the prologue in its entirety is the work of the St Albans copyist
or of someone working alongside him, and that it had a dual purpose, depending
on whether it was heard in performance or contemplated privately in conjunction
with the images.

The
Origins of the Poem

In his 1872 edition
of the VSA, boldly subtitled ‘poème du XIe
siècle’, Gaston Paris argued that the St Albans text is a
twelfth-century copy by an Anglo-Norman scribe of a lost eleventh-century
original composed in Normandy around 1040. It would thus be even earlier
than the lost original of the Roland which is generally supposed
to date from the second half of the eleventh century. Paris found the
language of the VSA to be more developed than that of the Eulalia
(ninth century) and Clermont Passion (tenth century), but more
archaic than that of the Roland. Comparing the St Albans (L)
version of the VSA with that found in A (another twelfth-century
manuscript of English origin), he concluded that their similarities were
best explained by their common derivation from a lost manuscript, a.
He explained the variant readings of P, a thirteenth-century
manuscript, by its derivation from another hypothetical lost manuscript,
b. Both a and b would derive from yet another
lost manuscript, x, which would depend ultimately on the lost
Urtext, O, written around 1040.

Most historians of
French literature have accepted the arguments which Paris advanced for
a lost original of the Alexis, even if they have not concurred entirely
with his dating. Some (e.g. Sckommodau, 1963) have suggested on linguistic
and ideological grounds that it may postdate the First Crusade of 1095.
The art historian Pächt (1960: 142-4), whilst acknowledging that
the linguistic arguments lay outside his competence, suggested intriguingly
that the Psalter version of the poem may have been the first version in
French and may have originated at St Albans. The linguistic evidence that
the poem predates the prologue nevertheless remains compelling and has
been strengthened by Tyssens’s (1966) study.

Gaston Paris (1872:
43-45) ventured to suggest that the lost Urtext was the work
of Tedbalt of Vernon, a canon in Rouen in the mid-eleventh century. This
conjecture was based purely on the account of an eleventh-century monk
from the abbey of Fontenelle who records that Tedbalt translated various
saints’ lives from Latin into French. The resultant songs are described
as pleasant with a jingling rhythm (‘rythme tintant’).
It is true that such a description might also seem to fit the assonanced
form of the Alexis, but this is a very flimsy basis on which to argue
a case for Tedbalt as author. In fairness, Paris admits himself that without
further evidence we must regard the author as unknown.

Paris chose to take
L, the St Albans Psalter copy, as the base manuscript for his
edition of the VSA. Its language is the most archaic of the extant
manuscripts and he argued on this basis that it was the closest reflection
of the lost Urtext. A long line of textual editors have followed his lead
in this, but scholarly opinion is nonetheless divided. A lively debate
was engaged between Lausberg (1955), who, like Paris, favoured L,
and Sckommodau (1954 & 1956) who preferred manuscript A.
The most interesting question for our purposes, and one to which we will
be returning, is whether the last fifteen stanzas of L, which
do not appear in A, represent an addition to the original.

Vernacular
Hagiography

Surprising though
it may seem, saints’ lives were enormously popular in the Middle
Ages; the survival of some two hundred Old French verse Lives testifies
to this. As the prologue to the VSA indicates, they were a source
of entertainment (‘pleasant song’) as well as edification.
They were written by clerks, for oral delivery to a lay public who looked
to the saints as intercessors. The concluding stanza of the St Albans
copy of the VSA creates complicity between audience and narrator
with its use of the first-person plural form (‘let us remember this
holy man’), and allows for audience participation in the closing
Pater Noster. It has been suggested in the light of this closing prayer
and in the light of line 542 with its reference to the honouring of St
Alexis on his feastday, that the poem may have been intended for recitation
in church. Goldschmidt (1895) thought that it may have been recited/sung
on the occasion of the dedication of the chapel of St Alexis in St Albans
Abbey some time between 1115 and 1119. Such a performance would necessarily
have predated the copying of L if we accept that it dates from
c. 1123. It has been suggested (Mölk, 1978: 342) that the cult of
St Alexis, which did not last long at St Albans, was borrowed from the
Norman abbey of Bec, which in turn derived it from Monte Cassino. The
cult of Alexis in France was apparently propagated, in the absence of
relics, purely by literature, originally in the form of the Latin Vita.

The
Structure of the VSA

As compared to the
Latin Vita, which is now widely regarded as its ultimate
source (see Rychner (1985: 21-37) who debunks the Latin poem Pater
Deus ingenite as source), the Old French VSA concentrates
as much, if not more, on the effects which Alexis has on those around
him and on the events which occur after his death, as on his life itself.
The family’s laments on the discovery of the corpse occupy twenty-two
stanzas (ll. 386-495), nearly a fifth of the total poem. Even more strikingly,
Alexis is dead in line 332, but there is nearly half of the poem still
to come. Vincent (1963:537) has calculated that only 33 stanzas of the
poem are devoted to Alexis himself, whereas the family take up 57 stanzas,
the people of Rome, the Pope and emperors a further 25 stanzas, and the
introduction and conclusion the remainder. The poet was faced with the
difficult task of trying to give an appealing, popular account of a singularly
unappealing saint who showed an unfeeling, even inhuman, disregard in
life for the suffering of others. His solution was to humanize and dramatize
the story, as the b version of the Latin Vita had already
done in a more limited way (see Pächt, 1960: 133), by concentrating
on the grief of the parents and bride, whose lamentations on the death
of Alexis form the real climax of the story. At the same time, the French
text exalts Alexis by concentrating on the beneficial effects which the
saint brought after his death to the community in Rome and in which the
audience of the poem may also share.

In contrast to what
Rickard (1974: 37) has called the “limping laconism” of the
earliest vernacular texts, such as the Sequence of Saint Eulalia and the
Life of Saint Leger, the VSA is an engaging, well-paced narrative,
enlivened by dramatic speeches and colourful description, for example
of the emperors strewing gold and silver before the crowds in a vain attempt
to lure them away from the body of Alexis (ll. 526-30). Most surprisingly,
the VSA displays a mastery of poetic style, rhetoric and composition
which belies the absence of earlier vernacular models, and which can only
have been gained from training in the Latin tradition. Curtius (1936)
has shown persuasively how the topoi, images, and rhetorical frames of
the VSA, are drawn from medieval Latin literature.

The striking mathematical
symmetries of the VSA have been analysed in detail by Hatcher
(1952), who sees the poem as a triptych, each part concerning itself with
a separate identity of Alexis, first as the son of Eufemien, then as the
man of God, and finally as saint. The first part, a prelude of ten stanzas,
begins by elaborating the well-known topos of ‘Good was the world
in the time of the ancients’ (ll. 1-10). After this lament for the
decline of Christian virtues in the contemporary world, it then introduces
the singularly virtuous son of Eufemien, Alexis. We should note in passing
that the VSA as preserved in the St Albans Psalter thus has two
introductions, with the so-called prose
prologue (p. 57) which points the spiritual application of the poem
to a particular audience, supplementing the more general prelude of the
poem itself.

Hatcher detects various
symmetries in the text, the most significant of which were probably intentional.
Leaving aside the ten stanzas of introduction and prelude, the narrative
has two main sections; fifty-six are devoted to Alexis as the man of God,
and fifty-six to Alexis as saint, followed by a two-stanza conclusion.
Between the two main sections, a central stanza, number 67, recounts the
death of Alexis, and in the central line of this, line 333, his ascension
to Heaven occurs. Hatcher’s grouping of events into episodes, as
indicated in the table below, is sometimes debatable, but the bipartite
division of the main narrative with the death of Alexis at its centre
is unquestionable.

Stanzas

Episode

Stanza
total

1-2

Introduction

2

3-10

Prelude to the life of Saint Alexis

8

11-15

Alexisí decision to leave his fatherís house

5

16-38

Alexisí fllight and life abroad

23

39-43

Alexisí decision to return to his fatherís house

5

44-66

Alexisí return and his life in his fatherís house (beneath the stairs)

23

67

DEATH OF ALEXIS

1

68-77

Alexis dead, identified & honoured as saint by Pope and Emperors

10

78-100

Alexis dead, lamented by his family

23

101-123

Alexis dead, honoured as saint by the world, and at home in Paradise

23

124-125

Conclusion

2

We should not be surprised
to find this patterning, given that the basic structural pattern of the
medieval story was bipartite (see Ryding, 1971). A deliberate intent to
shape the narrative in this way would account both for the expansion of
events after the death of Alexis, as compared to the account of the Latin
Vita, and for the surprising compression of events leading up
to his flight from home. Whereas the Latin Vita expands upon
the piety of Alexis’s early life, thus giving some preparation for
his critical decision to abandon his bride and leave home, the French
text concentrates on his secular upbringing before stating abruptly that
the marriage is ‘an arrangement he would have preferred nothing
of/ So completely are his thoughts fixed on God’ (ll. 49-50). To
modern taste, this may seem an extraordinary failure to capitalise on
the psychological interest of the story, but, as Ryding (1971: 121-2)
points out, it is by no means unusual to find such an unprepared turning-point
in medieval narrative.

Narrative
Motifs and Patterns

One of the most striking
features of the VSA is the series of binary oppositions at the thematic
level which have a clear didactic purpose. These oppositions are intimately
related to the bipartite structure of the narrative of which the ascetic
life of Alexis on this earth forms the first part, and the recognition
and glory which he attains after death, the second. As we have seen, the
prelude begins (ll. 1-10) with a contrast between the virtuous past and
the decadent present. In his speech to the bride, Alexis points what is
to be the dominant thematic opposition of the poem, between the fallacious
claims of this earthly life and the truth of the heavenly life (ll. 63-4),
between the imperfection of earthly love (l. 68) and the perfection of
divine love. This opposition is developed in the motif of joy versus sadness
which runs throughout the poem. Thus, in the view of Alexis, true joy
is not to be found in this world; its fleeting joy unfailingly ‘turns
back into great sorrow’ (l. 70). His viewpoint is contrasted with
that of his mother and father whose earthly joy is shattered by his abandoning
them to serve God (l. 135), and with the bride for whom his death destroys
all hope of joy on this earth (l. 492). The family’s extreme grief
on learning of his death is in turn contrasted with the joy of the people
and the Pope on recognising their new saint. If the family does not immediately
respond to the Pope’s injunction to share in the general joy (ll.
501-5), they do finally turn back to God and the bride attains true heavenly
joy when she is united with Alexis in paradise (l. 610).

The contrast between
the values of this world and higher spiritual values is underlined by
the oppositional associations of the word ‘honur’, quoted
in French, because it has been of necessity variously translated in the
English version of the text. For Alexis’s father, worldly position
is all-important and something which he would dearly wish to have been
able to pass on to his son (l. 407). By contrast, for Alexis, there is
no lasting honour in this world (l. 69). Indeed, the marks of honour,
or recognition, with which the world wishes to favour him, whether at
home or abroad, are constantly rejected. He flees from his privileged
home and status, he is not tempted from his single-minded devotion to
God by any honours which might come to him (l. 164), and he flees from
what he sees as the burden of recognition in Alsis when he is identified
as the man of God (l. 188). His greatest fear when he then lands in Rome
is that his parents may recognise him and seek to burden him again with
the worldy dues from which he thought he had escaped. The opposition between
the undesirable burden which worldly ‘honur’ represents for
Alexis and the positive, albeit thwarted, purpose which it represents
for his parents is finally resolved in line 604. As in the case of earthly
versus heavenly joy studied above, heavenly values again triumph here.
The family turns back to God, their souls are saved, thanks to the saintly
Alexis, and their life together is described as ‘honourable’,
but honourable in a true and spiritual way, rather than in the way that
they had previously conceived it. Meanwhile, Alexis, who had given up
all his worldly possessions (stanza 19), is richly and reverently honoured
in death, the jewels and gold with which his sarcophagus is adorned (l.
586) being an acceptable expression of popular devotion to and recognition
of the saint.

This leads us to
another important oppositional motif in the text, recognition versus non-recognition.
The first part of the narrative is dominated by repeated instances of
failure to recognise Alexis. Thus, in Alsis, the father’s servants
fail to see Alexis in the beggar to whom they give alms (stanzas 23-25),
and later the sacristan fails, until he is given more specific guidance,
to identify him as the man of God (ll. 174-5). Most strikingly, his own
family back in Rome repeatedly fail to recognise him; his father does
not recognise him when they speak in the street, for seventeen years no-one
in the household recognises Alexis in the beggar living under the stairs,
and finally no-one can guess who the man of God may be when the voice
from the sanctuary sends the Pope and Emperors to look in Eufemien’s
house. Ryding (1971: 94-5) points out that the writer has gone to great
lengths to ensure that the importance of this motif would not be lost
on his audience. By contrast with the Latin Vita, the French
text underlines the first instance of non-recognition, repeating three
times, in lines 115, 120 and 121, that the servants did not recognise
Alexis. As Ryding points out, this scene contributes very little of narrative
consequence and is not exploited for its dramatic value. Rather it is
elaborated in order to prefigure the thematic importance of non-recognition
in the first half of the text. This will contrast with the general recognition
and acclaim which Alexis receives after his death. The evident didactic
purpose of the writer is to equate non-recognition with the moral blindness
of sinners. As the penultimate stanza of the poem (ll. 616-20) states
unequivocally, we unfortunate mortals are blind and have lost our senses;
it is through this holy man Alexis that we must recover our sight.

Paradoxically, it
is Alexis himself, so long anxious to preserve his anonymity, who deliberately
arranges his ultimate recognition by writing a letter which reveals his
identity. He is careful, however, that the letter should not be made public
until after he is dead (ll. 286-7), and even then will not yield it up
to his father Eufemien who tries to prise it from his grasp (l. 351).
He entrusts it instead to the Pope, who in turn hands it to a clerk who
reads its contents aloud to the assembled people (ll. 371-7). Leupin (1989)
and Cazelles (1989) have both commented on the significance of the written
text, the letter, within the larger written text, the VSA itself, and
on the interaction between orality and textuality within both. The written
text is seen as the repository of truth which is entrusted to the Church.
The laity can only access this truth indirectly when it is delivered orally
to them. This applies both to the letter itself and to the hagiographical
poem as a whole. To conclude, we might see in the refusal of Alexis to
cede the letter to his father Eufemien, a final rejection of the family
ties and earthly values which throughout the poem are set in opposition
to spiritual values. The ability to write, which had been part of Eufemien’s
legacy to his son (ll. 33-4), is here turned by Alexis to a divine purpose,
rather than to the secular service of the emperor for which his father
(l. 35) had destined him.

The Dramatic Style of the
VSA

The modern reader
may sometimes find that the action of the VSA proceeds in fits
and starts, but in this it is typical of much medieval narrative, for
example the Chanson de Roland with its laisses similaires.
Instead of the unified linear development of an event, we find a series
of trackings backwards and forwards to reframe the same action, resulting
in the juxtaposition of seemingly autonomous scenes. Auerbach (1953: 114-5)
draws attention to stanzas 12-14 where Alexis takes leave of his bride
as a case in point. Thus stanza 13 resumes the situation which had already
existed at the beginning of stanza 12, with Alexis and his bride together
alone in the chamber, but the action is now carried forward in a different
direction. Whereas stanza 12 had concerned itself with the innermost thoughts
of Alexis, stanza 13 reports how he begins to address his bride. The reported
speech of stanza 13 is then recapitulated in the direct speech of stanza
14. Yet, in a sense, stanza 14 represents a backtracking, since it does
not get to the point already reached in stanza 13 with the statement that
Alexis is anxious to take his leave. Auerbach considers the whole of the
VSA to be composed of a mosaic of such mutually independent scenes,
each containing an expressive and decisive gesture, such as Alexis standing
looking at the bed (stanza 12), or Alexis speaking to the bride (stanzas
13 and 14). There is evident dramatic potential in these.

A modern reader will
also be struck by the alternation of past and present tenses in the narrative.
For example, the account of the wedding night is first situated in the
past: ‘The boy did not wish to anger his father/ He came into the
chamber where his wife was’ (ll. 54-5), but then slips into the
present tense for the dramatic moment of crisis, ‘As he sees the
bed, he looked at the maiden/ He then remembers his Heavenly Lord’
(ll. 56-7). It should be said that there was a considerable degree of
freedom in Old French over the use of tenses, and the present tense was
very commonly used to narrate past time. This use of the ‘historic
present’ survives to a more limited extent in modern written French,
and occurs also in speech, both in French and English, when someone is
telling a story. Thus a speaker may begin by locating an event in the
past, but then actualise, and in a sense relive it, by slipping into the
present, for example “and then he says …” . This tense-shifting
is a characteristic of oral delivery which was much exploited by medieval
storytellers in order to engage their audience with the quasi-dramatic
re-enactment of their tale. Uitti (1973: 50-51) has argued that the tense-shifting
in the VSA is an important means by which the poet reinforces the dual
perspective of narrator and protagonist within the rhetorical structure
of the tale. The narrator confirms his own position by framing the action
in the past, whilst at the same time allowing his audience to feel that
they are seeing and hearing characters before them in the present.

He also on occasion
draws attention to himself as narrator and creates a rapport with his
audience by the use of first-person interventions. At the outset he creates
a sense of community with the audience by his reference to ‘our
ancestors’ (l.5). He also establishes himself as source of authority
and mediator for the tale, anticipating the audience’s possible
impatience and defending the preamble about Eufemien thus: ‘I am
telling you this, because I wish to speak about a son of his’ (l.
15). When the scene shifts with characteristically medieval abruptness
from Alexis the beggar in Alsis back to the grieving family in Rome, he
points the transition: ‘Now I will return to the father and mother/And
to the bride whom he had married’ (ll. 101-2). At the end, he establishes
complicity with his audience and underlines his own humanity with the
first-person plural exclamation, ‘Alas! Unfortunate mortals! How
blind we are!’ (l. 616), before officiating in the closing prayer
on behalf of them all. The relationship thus created and sustained between
narrator and audience is crucial in ensuring receptiveness for the message
of the tale and engagement with its drama.

It is above all,
however, the direct speech of the characters themselves in the VSA which
encourages the audience to engage with the drama. The lively development
of this direct speech constitutes the most notable divergence of the Old
French poem from the Latin Vita. Admittedly, Alexis himself speaks only
rarely and briefly, and the audience is little encouraged by any of his
utterances to identify with a character whose single-minded asceticism
sets him apart from common humanity. Despite the poet’s ultimate
didactic purpose in privileging the spiritual values of Alexis over the
earthbound concerns of the family, nevertheless it is their speech which
invites an emotional response from the audience. Their laments, which
occur always in the sequence, father, mother and bride, appear on three
occasions, first, and very briefly, immediately after the departure of
Alexis from home (ll. 106-10), secondly when the servants return from
Edessa with the news that they have been unable to find him (ll. 126-55),
and finally and most intensely when the corpse of Alexis is discovered
(ll. 386-495).

The individual members
of the family are sharply delineated by their speech. In his final lament,
the father grieves not only for the loss of his heir but for the thwarting
of his whole purpose in life which had been to hand on his estate to future
generations of the family (ll. 401-20). Even if they know that his values
must not be approved, the audience can sympathise with his feelings. The
mother’s grief is both more visceral than the father’s and
more violently expressed. Her lament on the death of Alexis (ll. 422-65)
is a dramatic and highly affective expression of grief and anger, yet
the greatest drama lies in the contrast between her furious tone and the
more serene and poignant expression of the bride which follows. The bride’s
tender expression of frustrated longing for her missing husband, of regret
for the physical change which has come over his once handsome form, and
of her own constant love for him (ll. 466-95) plays a pivotal role. As
Uitti (1973: 58) points out, she takes her place in the series (father,
mother, bride), yet at the same time she enjoys a particular relationship
with Alexis, which sets her apart from and contrasts her with that series.
Unlike the mother who laments that Alexis has not once spoken to her alone
in all the time he has dwelt under the stairs (l. 448), the bride was
at least favoured with a private homily before he left home in the first
place (ll.66-70). How much she understood of the significance of his words,
or of his parting gifts to her, is debatable, but when she learns of his
death and of his saintly life, she does at last find consolation in following
his example and turning to God. Her commitment to serve God (ll. 494-5)
changes the tone of the poem in preparation both for Rome’s joyful
veneration of the saint and for her own eventual blissful reunion in Heaven
with him (ll. 606-8).

In her analysis of
the poem, Hatcher (1952: 129) argued that by renouncing his family, Alexis
determines all their reactions and reduces them to ‘puppets in a
sorrowful drama full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. Yet
in dramatic terms, as Vincent (1963: 530) has demonstrated, Alexis is
the static figure. It is God, rather than Alexis, who is the prime mover,
intervening to make the statue in Alsis identify Alexis as the man of
God, and so bring him back to Rome. As for Alexis, once his course is
set in God’s service, he does not waver from it (1. 165); ‘He
loves God more than all his lineage’ (l. 250). In contrast to the
otherworldliness of Alexis and his passive indifference to their suffering,
which ‘is as nothing to him’ (l. 245), the family appear as
real people, who struggle with their fate. It is their journey through
harrowing grief to a painfully learned acceptance of God’s will
which lies at the heart of the drama.

Their blindness to
God’s purposes occasions much dramatic irony throughout the poem.
Eufemien and his wife pray for a child who will be pleasing to God (ll.
24-5). Yet they are unhappy when they get exactly what they had asked
for, a son whose thoughts are entirely fixed on God (l. 50). There is
deep irony also in the fact that the family see Alexis so often when he
is living under their stairs, yet fail to recognise him (stanza 48). He
is never so far removed from them as when he is so close by. Most poignant
of all is the irony when Alexis appears as a stranger to his father and
begs to be given shelter and food ‘for the sake of your son’
(l. 219).

The family’s
ironic ignorance is the mainspring of the dramatic suspense which arises
when the people of Rome are searching in vain for the man of God who is
to be their salvation. Even when the voice tells them to look in the house
of Eufemien, they still cannot find him, because neither Eufemien nor
any member of his household whom he questions knows who or where this
man of God may be. The order in which events are presented creates further
dramatic irony, since the audience has already been informed of the letter
which Alexis has written on his deathbed (stanzas 56-8) and knows what
a surprise lies in store for Eufemien and the others when the faithful
servant reveals the presence of the dead saint beneath the stairs.

The
Ending of the Poem

It has been argued
by Sckommodau (1954) and Robertson (1970) that the lost original of the
VSA ended, like the version preserved in manuscript A,
at line 550, and that the last fifteen stanzas of the St Albans version
(and of manuscripts P and V) represent a later addition
to the poem. Carr (1976) has noted an anomalous reference in these final
stanzas to danz Alexis (l. 568). This breaks the otherwise rigid
pattern whereby the dead saint in the second half of the poem is designated
sainz Alexis and the living Alexis in the first part of the poem
danz Alexis. This apparent aberration might lend support to the
view that the last fifteen stanzas were not part of the original poem.
However, most critics prefer to see the St Albans version (L)
as the more faithful reflection of the original, and A with its
110 stanzas as a later abridgment. The most curious feature of the St
Albans version is that it has in effect two conclusions. It includes the
call to penitence and communal prayer ‘Let us pray to God, the Holy
Trinity/ That with God in Heaven together we may reign’ (ll. 549-50),
which serve as a conclusion in manuscript A, but then the narrative
takes off again and is brought to a close by another concluding prayer
in stanza 125. In this respect it is unique. Although the final fifteen
stanzas also appear in manuscripts P and V, they are
not preceded there by the pre-emptive conclusion of lines 541-550. Mölk
(1978: 341) has suggested that the St Albans version with its two conclusions
may represent a contamination of the original poem with the abridged version.
In any case, the precise symmetries which Hatcher (1952) has observed
in the poem are unique to the St Albans version, contaminated or not,
with all its 125 stanzas.

The content of the final fifteen stanzas may be resumed thus:

Stanzas

Subject

111-2

Miracles of healing

113

Conversion of
the emperors

114-8

Lying in state
and ceremonial burial

119-20

Family’s
grief

121-2

Salvation of
the family

123-4

Narrator’s
homily

125

Concluding prayer

Critics
have observed that the main purpose of this closing section is to draw
the lay audience into the celebration of the saint’s life. He is
held up to them not primarily as a model for imitation, for who but Christ,
whom Alexis himself imitates, could spend 34 years forsaking all family
ties and meekly suffering indignities (ll. 266-70)? Rather he is seen
as an intercessor for the people of Rome in the past, and also for the
poet’s audience in the present, and the final communal prayer is
fittingly channelled through him. We should also note that it is only
in these final fifteen stanzas that the audience hears of the ultimate
fate of the family. Most importantly, given the suggested parallels between
Christina and the faithful, chaste bride, it is only here (stanza 122)
that the bride is said to be reunited in Heaven with Alexis.

CONCLUSION

It is easy to see
how the dramatic and didactic qualities of the VSA would have
appealed to Geoffrey of Gorron, if indeed it was he who was responsible
for including the text in the St Albans Psalter. We know that he had staged
a religious play about the life of Saint Catherine for a lay audience
in Dunstable before he became a monk at St Albans. We can only speculate
about the manner and circumstances in which the Alexis poem might have
been performed. It may indeed have been recited/sung dramatically in a
liturgical setting, as Bullington (1991: 216) has suggested. What is certain
is that the visual presentation of the text on the page, accompanied not
only by the tinted drawings on p. 57, but also by the Emmaus pictures
on pp. 69-71 which gloss the theme of non-recognition in the poem and
offer parallels with the life of Christina (see the Commentary on the
Alexis quire), is itself dramatic and didactic. The visual message of
the Alexis drawings with the bride at centre- stage is reinforced by the
prologue which, as we have seen, points the spiritual application of the
story to those like Christina of Markyate who ‘take delight in heavenly
joys and virginal marriage’. We might well conclude with Kendrick
(1989: 29) that the mind which framed this presentation was that of a
teacher who wanted to make the text relevant to contemporary lives.